Culture

Book: 'Aerotropolis: The Way We'll Live Next'

Predictions on the future can be unnerving, be they apocalyptic ("The world ends tomorrow!") or merely atmospheric ("Expect more tornadoes!"). In their book Aerotropolis: The Way We'll Live Next, co-authors Greg Lindsay and John Kasarda explore a concept that must have been extremely unnerving when it was first introduced in Popular Science in 1939: the Aerotropolis. Kasarda and Lindsay update the term to describe the cities of tomorrow, which they expect to be built with a primary focus on airports, with their surrounding infrastructure for goods and services, and outer rings of inhabitable spaces for residents. Although it may sound somewhat incredible, Lindsay offers evidence in the form of journalistic case-studies of places like Incheon, South Korea, and takes a few peeps into the history of LAX, IAD (Dulles), and ORD (Chicago's O'Hare) to support Kasarda’s theories on how densification wraps airports the way it once grew around ports . • $30; Farrar, Straus and Giroux, March 2011